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My husband very rarely has nightmares. When he does, they’re usually right before he wakes up, and he wakes up screaming and is upset for the rest of his day.

On prior, very disturbing dream he had was a variant on the common college dream. He was taking this class he really, really liked. But one morning, he went to class and there was the final! And he’d totally forgotten to study for it! So for this class he loved, he sat there miserable, unable to answer a single question. This was when the D&D 3rd Edition book came out. The class he was taking was on D&D. The questions he was unable to answer were things like, “If you have a third level party of four players, and they are attacked by a party of 8 orcs, what is the challenge rating of… ” Heh heh. The funny thing is, he woke up SCREAMING and really, really upset. It was an honest-to-god nightmare. I managed to be sympathetic and soothing. For about 2 minutes. I still think that’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

This morning he had another nightmare.

You see… (pausing to let the sense of doom and horror build) he had forgotten to pre-register for Gencon!!!! So there he was! Ready to play! Dice in hand! And he hadn’t registered for ANY GAMES! And honestly, he woke up screaming again and saying “how awful, how awful!!” I assumed he had a dream where I turned into a zombie and ate his brain or something but no. Failure to pre-register for Gencon events.

My husband is such a dear, delightful, wonderful geek.

One of my friends at church asked me if she could organize my baby shower. (This woman is fabulous at organizing.) Touched and flattered, I said yes. And I’m excited. I feel really overwhelmed by it all, though. So far she’s lined up a date, got a co-chair, er, host. Asked me for a list of friends I’d like invited, and asked where I’m registered.

Yipe!

So the registry… she has a good point. She says that if I register for one or two larger items, folks can contribute an amount they can afford (whether that’s $5 or $50) and not feel like their contribution is obvious. But I hate asking for things. We’re very fortunate, financially, and I *really* feel like people don’t owe us anything in the way of presents. (Of course, like all human beings, I also like presents.) Couple that with the fact I have no *clue* what I need or want for a baby (although this cute but impractical bassinet comes to mind) and my previously posted current issues with pregnancy, and I’m flummoxed.

And with the guest list thing. I live in a bunch of different worlds. They’re not intentionally distinct for the most part, but my RL friends don’t go to my church and my church friends aren’t generally on-line. And then there’s family. And work. I’m not sure if my RL friends would like to attend a shower from church, or if they’d like to have one seperately (and since I’m not supposed to be organizing any of this, I don’t want to ask either. That seems wrong.)

Er, so as my friends, what do you suggest? What should I register for and where? How can I effectively communicate that I want to share joy and time together, but don’t need things if you don’t feel the overwhelming urge to give them? If you think you are the sort of person who would like to attend a baby shower for me, would you rather attend a church-centric one or should I take a wild leap of faith and guess that my RL friends might also host me one and you’d rather attend that one?

I’ve never done this before. I don’t think I’ve been to more than one or two baby showers in my whole life. And to be honest, I’m a whole lot less comfortable with this baby thing than I was the wedding thing.

HELP!

Due to laziness, I failed to cancel my last appointment with my old doctor. I figured it was easier to go and get my records and be done with it. He was actually nominally on time this morning, which came as nothing so much as a pleasant surprise. They seem to be very ultrasound happy at their office (they have an ultrasound on premesis) because they ordered another look.

And now I don’t know what end is up.

We’ve already had two rounds of ultrasounds, so anything there should’ve shown before now. But apparently, my children are the sneaky sort. Yes, children. Folks, this ultrasound showed not only an Alpha, but a Beta as well. It wasn’t super-clear — Beta was still mostly occluded by Alpha. We basically just saw an additional hand and arm where no hand and arm should be. (I actually freaked, the ultrasound tech reassured me that Alpha doesn’t have three arms.)

I’m just sort of stunned. Despite the fact that I’m switching to the midwife, I sheduled a followup with the ultrasound folks to get a better look (apparently there’s an internal ?? technique that’ll probably show Beta better). So yeah. Two.

So if you could send some thoughts to my husband and me… we were nervous enough about being the parents of one. Being the parents of twins right off the bat is totally going to be a trial by fire.

I wonder if they’re fraternal or identical.

By the way, I hope you all have a terrific April Fools day!

Editor’s note: this was the finest April Fool’s prank of my life. I deleted any comments that noted that it was April 1st and played it up to the hilt for a few hours. I got most of my friends something good, and my had to talk my sister out of calling my mom with the amazing news. It’s still one of my fonder memories.

I’ve become increasingly convinced, psychologically, that there is a relationship between the winter and my morning sickness. I’m one day shy of my 14th week of pregnancy. Morning sickness usually arrives uninvited at about week 6 (roughly two weeks after you miss your period) and stays for another 6 weeks. It’s unusual, though not unheard of, for morning sickness to last this long.

For me, it’s actually gotten much, much worse in the last two weeks. For most of my pregnancy, I could eat stuff, I was just picky. And I would throw up every couple days. Now, I can hardly eat anything. (Amazingly, I have yet to lose much weight. I do not understand this.) I spent a week throwing up morning and night. Now I’m just throwing up every night. Every single night. At about 8:30.

Just in the way my sickness has extended past it’s usual date and worsened at the end, so goes winter. By the end of March, you can usually see the grass. We still have foot deep drifts in our back yard. It’s snowing several days after the vernal equinox.

Both of them seem to stretch back in my memory. I hardly remember what it felt like to feel good, to eat food and enjoy it, to have energy and enthusiasm. I hardly remember a time when I could walk outside without a coat, and feel the warm wind on my face. I don’t remember the sound of lawnmowers buzzing and kids jumping in and out of pools. I just remember the scrape of ice and the sound of the snowblower.

The consolation is supposed to be that both of these will inevitably and invariably come to an end. This pregnancy will cease. There is no way for it not. Hopefully the morning sickness will diminish before I deliver, but even if it’s 9 months of agony, it’s finite. Spring, too, will eventually arrive. There was no volcano chilling the world. The grass will green, the garden go, the kids will go back to splashing.

But I don’t believe it viscerally anymore. And it seems like every setback I experience with my health pushes spring back. And every snowflake adds to the weight of my nausea.

I miss being me. I miss being cheerful and happy and energetic. I hate staring blankly at my screen, wishing I was asleep because asleep is the only way I feel good. I hate it.

Having pretty much decided that I’d like to change physicians, and being somewhat… distractable at work today, I launched into finding a midwife in my area. I’d looked originally. Really, I’d looked hard. But ironically, in some of the paperwork my current doctor gave me describing the hospital, it had mentioned a midwifery practice. So I looked again, and this time I found one.

There’s just the one midwife. She’s actually covered on weekends by the same family practice that I’ll be leaving, but my particular doctor is her least-favorite replacement and isn’t covering until October 21. If I’m still pregnant by the third week of October (my due date being the third week of September) uh, we have issues. She actually confirmed my worst suspicions by saying that he was the only doctor in the practice who still performed episiotomies as standard procedure. Now I would like to think that he’d listen to me if I said I didn’t want one, but…

So now all I have to do is get my records from my old doctor, but in a way that I don’t make waves since my midwife and my old doctor are colleagues.

My blog has been rather health-related of late. This could be because my health has become my primary focus of energy. Being sick will do that to you. But unfortunately, that’s tedious to read and doesn’t really create enjoyable comment strings or anything. It’s hard to think of anything else when you’re feeling so sick.

Today is better though. Both my husband and I have left home for the first time since Wednesday, after a good night’s sleep. We’re both feeling better. I’m getting very antsy about having done nothing fun or productive in my personal life for about two weeks (I was exhausted before I was sick if you recall.) That’s a good sign that maybe I’ll get enough energy to do something about it. I did manage to dye my hair last night!

I went to my doctor yesterday. Hm. I’m starting to get nervous about this. See, I’m not really that picky about the whole health care provider thing. I know a lot of people invest a lot of energy into finding the perfect person to help them deliver their babies, and I think that’s great. But I don’t have wildly strong opinions about how my birth process should go, and tend to be somewhat deferential to, you know, the people who do it for a living and have tons more training than I do. But I don’t think we’re a good match. He’s just a little too paternalistic for me to take. If, for example, I ask him a question, “Gee, Dr., my calorie intake hasn’t been enough to keep a Leprechaun on its toes, and it’s been 8 weeks of morning sickness. When do we get worried?” he doesn’t answer my question. He reassures me. “Oh, don’t worry, the baby will take whatever nutrition it needs from your hide.” Now, reassurance is good, but it wasn’t what I was after. I was after a “Well, if you drop 5% of your BMI… if you haven’t started feeling better by the 16th week… etc.” I mentioned that the list of approved medicines he gave us was a name brand list. (It has stuff like Sudafed, Tylenol, etc. on it.) Well, there are roughly 468 versions of Sudafed on the shelf. I bet some of them have ingredients I’m not supposed to have. It would be useful to have another list that had medical names and dosages (Psuephedrine, no more than 20 ml per 24 hour period) for those of us who keep track of information that way. He just smiled this infuriating smile and told me that if I followed his list, I’d be just fine. Argh! I’m smarter than that. I know I’m going to be just fine. I just want to know which expectorants I’m allowed to have.

He also does not treat my time as valuable. I was seen at 5:15 for a 4:00 appointment, which I was on time for. I know that’s typical, but it’s also annoying. Worse, I was seen at like 9:30 for an 8:30 am appointment I was on time for (he hadn’t shown up to the office by 9), so you can’t just talk it up to running late by afternoon.

Obviously, these are not horrible crimes against humanity. They’re nothing I couldn’t deal with if I need to. I just wonder if I need to. I looked for a midwife originally and came up empty. He is one of the two delivering doctors in the family practice that serves the hospital most convenient to my house. But I think I’d prefer to work with a professional who’s a tad less condescending.

Seasons 5 & 6 of Red Dwarf arrived on Thursday, which normally would be a cause for celebration. But I was too sick for Red Dwarf. However last night I thought my stomach was up to some Rimmer and Lister. We went to bed and I took a veritable drug cocktail. I hate taking drugs normally. I really, really hate taking them when pregnant. I realized about 20 minutes after taking them that the Sudafed was part of the problem. A big part. You see, it dries the membranes so that breathing, through any of the relevant orifices, hurts. Sure you CAN breathe through your nose… if you’re willing to put up with the stabbing pains. (And that’s with the humidifier going full-bore.) Great. 3 hours and 40 minutes of stabbing pains to go. I woke up a few times during the night, but rougly half as much as last night. And then this morning — nominally — a wonderful thing happened. We woke up. And discovered that it was 11:20.

Now, on a NORMAL Sunday this would be the cause for apoplexy, since we’d be roughly 3 hours late to teach Sunday School. But this weekend we were supposed to go to New York. (Ha ha!) So we’d taken care of our class already. So today, for the first Sunday since probably mid-Summer, we are at home and not at church. This is good. I’m not up for Sunday School. Anyway, I don’t remember being awake for any of the period between roughly 7 and 11 when one might consider it appropriate to get up, which means that I got at least 4 hours of high quality uninterrupted sleep. Not that this means I’m not currently considering taking a little nap, but it was good.

I’m feeling better this morning. The cold seems to have moved mostly out of my head (just some odds and ends to clean up there) and taken residence in my chest, where I presume it will remain for roughly the next 3 months. I did NOT throw up brushing my teeth this morning for the first time since Wednesday. I might even be able to, you know, *do* something today. Not much of something, but a little something.

And there’s baseball on the radio. (Happy sigh.)

Unfortunately, and strongly on the down side, my husband is inevitably coming down with the plague. I’m assuming it will be a different thing for him (no vomiting, for example), but he has all my sympathy. And he is at a really bad spot in work to be taking sick time — taking Friday off to take me to the ER was bad enough. Poor guy. While I’m not quite healthy enough to be as great a nurse to him as he was to me, at least I’m improving to the point where I don’t need much more nursing.

Spring had better be more fun than winter was.

I just got a call from my brother, who’s in college a few hundred miles away. “Hi!” says he in an ultra-perky voice. “GF and I are in Boston today. I want to see you!!!”

I interject that I spent all of yesterday in the emergency room and the house looks like tornados have taken up temporary residence.

Perky brother: “I’ll help you clean!”

I consider. He is family. The girlfriend is either a) irrelevant or b) will be family some day. So yeah, I guess he’s coming over this afternoon. Although if you believe that he will be any help at all cleaning, you’ve never met him.

I suppose I better put on some clothes. But I haven’t eaten lunch. Everything tastes wrong today.

I did not sleep last night. The cold entered its snotty phase, and despite permission from my doctor to take psuephedrine (much to my surprise, really) I simply couldn’t breathe. And I was coughing. And I spilled water all over the bed at 3 am.

So this morning, my husband and I both called in to work sick, and called our doctor.

To recap:
*Frequent vomiting (twice a day for three days)
*Complete lack of appetite (only one of those fun-fun vomiting sessions did I actually have anything in my stomach to lose — I’ve come to prefer dry heaves anyway. Less painful on the nose.)
*Diarrhea (however you spell that)
*Congestion
*Stomach pain
*Coughing
*Weakness and lack of energy (gee, wonder why? Couldn’t be my fabulous 500 calorie a day diet plan?)

El Doctoro sent us to the emergency room.

Ugh. You know, I’ve never actually gone to the emergency room for anything more complicated than stitches. No car accidents, no broken bones, nothing. I’ve been crazy healthy nearly my whole life. We arrived at the waiting room and waited. And waited. And waited. I was very grateful that my condition WASN’T actually an emergency or this would’ve flipped me out. We ended up in the lobby, getting hungry, thirsty and tired for more than three hours before we were admitted.

They did some tests, blood pressure, pulse etc. They freaked my out by failing to find Alpha’s heartbeat and commenting on the fact I’m not showing as much as they thought I should be. Diagnosis: severly dehydrated. Then they hooked me up to a nice, cold bag of special saline solution. One liter. They pumped that baby into me and then hooked up another. Sheesh! Then we got bumped to the hall. I had the inexpressible joy of trying to give a urine sample while hooked up to an IV (actually, apparently the needle they inserted into my arm was FLEXIBLE, but I had no idea that this was the case so I was convinced I was going to send it straight through my elbow with the least miscue. But the flexible needle thing is way kewl!). I had a nurse draw my blood there in the middle of the hall. Then we went down to the ultrasound room to make sure that I did, indeed, still have a living healthy baby in my womb. That took like 20 minutes. By this time, of course, I’m really miserable. It’s like 50 degrees in the hospital and I’m wandering around in the famous cover-nothing shifts. I’ve had nearly two liters of room temperature water entered into my body, and I’ve been sitting around in said cold shift with said cold water for probably an hour and a half. Also, dehydration helped dry up my mucous production, which was coming back with a vengeance with the liberal application of fluids. But there was a heartbeat. Alpha is much bigger than he was at 6 weeks, which should come as no surprise.

Finally, six hours after we arrived at the hospital, we were release. I can’t imagine going through that alone. Going through it with my incredibly kind and solicitous husband was bad enough.

So my take-homes are to drink more fluids (Ha! I could’ve drunk THREE liters in six hours if I’d known that’s all there was to it — I swear half of the dehydration came from sitting in the waiting room!) I’m supposed to see my doctor on Monday. And that’s it.

Needless to say, our plans to go to New York this weekend got scrapped. I’m hoping that being (at least momentarily) properly hydrated helps put me on the road to recovery, because I don’t think I can handle too many more days like this.

No really. In many ways my Mom was the perfect Betty Crocker mom. She stayed home with us until we were in school. She bakes bread from scratch. Sunday dinner was often pot roast. Our parents loved us and gave us everything we needed emotionally, physically, and financially. But when it came to sick, the parenting really left something to be desired. For example. When I had my wisdom teeth out, she had a family friend bring me back from the doctor. I’m a shy person, so I don’t insist that we stop to pick up my prescription of codeine. (*MISTAKE*) I come home to find my 11 year old brother also at home, sick. Really sick. With chicken pox as it turns out. My mother believes this is a good combination of affairs, since I’ll be staying home anyway (recovering from surgery) I can take care of my brother. I finally get codeine several hours later, having gotten desperate enough to call my mother and tell her she HAS to go get it for me!

When we weren’t feeling well, Mom would take our temperature. If it didn’t break three digits, she’d do the worst possible thing. She’d say, “It’s up to you if you go to school today. Only you know how you feel.” I rarely, if ever, run serious temperatures. I’d always convince myself I was faking it, and drag my sorry heinie into school. My sister, who had chronic strep infections, actually got to the point where she did the whole doctor thing herself.

When we were sick, Mom would be sure to drop in and see how we were doing at least twice a day. There was no coddling.

All this has led me to be a grownup who cannot believe, without strong empirical evidence, that I am indeed sick. Take today for example. Known facts: I have morning sickness, I have a cold, my back was/is out. I actually called in sick to work today (as opposed to “working from home” which I did yesterday). But I sincerely and honestly believe that I’m just faking it, and that I could be working if I was just tough enough.

Folks, I’ve thrown up three times in the last 24 hours including this morning. Yesterday’s calorie intake was 1) bowl of grape nuts 2) bowl of Cap’n Crunch 3) 10 Teddy Grahams and half a glass of milk. That’s IT. Yesterday, I was awake for a grand total of 8 hours. What, do I have to be hospitalized to really believe that I merit a sick day off work?! Sheesh.

Um, so that’s me now. The good thing is that I feel better today than yesterday. The bad thing is that’s making me feel even more guilty. Ugh.